Hello,
My question is about applications which typically start automatically and which you’d like to keep running. Think chat, file backup, etc…

When running Ubuntu this would work as follows: once the application window was open I could click the “x” button to close the window. This would close the window but NOT shutdown the program. Instead, the program icon would continue to appear in one of two locations: upper right or lower left of the screen. Hence the application would continue to run. In order to shutdown the application, you could right-click on the application icon or go to File > Quit. This was great for tools that should keep running without cluttering the usual “open applications” icons shown on the left-hand side of GNOME.

How can you get this effect in PureOS? When I click “x” on the application it will simply shutdown the application. Hence, I must click “-” to minimize it. But, this has the issue of cluttering the open application icons shown on the left-hand side. These are like background applications and so having a separate place for their icons and saying that “x” means close window and NOT shutdown application was nice.

I’m curious what package was used in PureOS that would allow the taskbar to pop up when sliding the mouse cursor to the left side of the screen. Given that I was forced to switch to Debian for compatibility reasons (LaTex, etc.) I’d really like to use this package here, but I can’t find it anywhere. Would anyone be so kind to point me in the right direction?

@hier, thanks for sharing more info about your experience with KDE/Plasma. I’ll keep that in mind as a plan B. To be honest, one of drivers for paying for Purism’s laptop was for things to “just work” and avoid making changes. I’d say this has been partly true.

@uzanto, your links and description were spot on! I had tried those gnome icon extensions and could get none to work to my satisfaction (installation error on some and others were overly sensitive to where the mouse must be for you to “click” and open the application).

For anyone else having this issue I believe the 4 minutes it took to read @uzanto’s post links is the proper GNOME answer. It doesn’t give the tray icons but gives a workflow that was designed to be slick and work.